Serbian was once the official language of Montenegro until 2007 when the old Constitution of 1992 was replaced with the new Constitution of Montenegro. Amid opposition from pro-Serbian parties, Montenegrin language was made the sole official language of the country and Serbian was recognized as a minority language along with Bosnian, Albanian, and Croatian. As per 2003 census results, 63.49% of the population take Serbian as their mother language.

Serbian is a kind of Serbo-Croatian spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighboring countries. There are two principal Serbian dialects, Shtokavian and Torlakian.

The literary and standard language is based on Shtokavian, which is also the basis of Standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. Serbian is the only European language with active digraphia, using both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.

Serbian is standardized around Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovinian .Apart from Shtokavian, the Torlak dialect, transitional to Macedonian in Bulgarian, is spoken in southeast Serbia. However, it does not have a literary tradition and is considered a low-prestige dialect.

Serbian translation service

We are a Corporate Member of American Translators Association (ATA), and we follow ATA guidelines to implement an extremely strict TEP (Translation, Editing, Proofreading) process for every project we win, i.e., we translate from scratch with the translated serbian documents reviewed by another editor then polished by a 3rd proofreader.

It means that we’ll submit 3 versions of lingual files to you at the time of delivery: Initial translation, Editing, and Proofreading versions separately, to prove that we’ve performed TEP process as promised.

CCJK commitments to our clients:

1. Honest, reliable, responsible, trustworthy and professional

2. Unlimited revisions to our translation until clients are totally satisfied with the job but without additional charge

3. We never use machine translations, which can only output poor translation quality, illegible to human beings

4. Guaranteed top quality at the most affordable prices. We’re responsible for the quality of translation, so you do not need to outsource another provider to authenticate the translation, saving you much time and cost!

History

Before 1400, most Serbian vernaculars had two accents, both with fall intonation—the short one and the long one. That is why they are called “old accents”. By 1500, the old accents moved by one syllable towards the beginning of the word, changing their quality to rising accents. The old accents logically remained only when they were on first syllable.

Not all dialects had this evolution; those who had it are called neo-shtokavian. The dispersal center was in eastern Herzegovina. Since the 16th century people had been emigrating from this area. The biggest migrations were to the north, then toward Military Krajina and to the seaside (Dalmatia, Istria, Dubrovnik area, including the islands of Mljet and Šipan).

In the 1920s and 1930s the royal government tried to settle people from this poor mountainous area to the Kosovo basin. Vojvodina was settled with inhabitants from this area after WWII.

Read Also: CCJK, YOUR TRANSLATION PARTNER OF SERBIAN

Writing system

Standard Serbian language uses both Cyrillic and Latin script.

Although Serbian language authorities recognize the official status for both scripts in contemporary standard Serbian language for more than half of a century now, due to historical reasons, Cyrillic was made the official script of Serbia’s administration by the 2006 Constitution.

However, the law does not regulate scripts in standard language, or standard language itself by any means, leaving the choice of script as a matter of personal preference and to the free will in all aspects of life (publishing, media, trade and commerce, etc.), except in government paperwork production and in official written communication with state officials which have to be in Cyrillic. Serbian is a rare and excellent example of synchronic digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them.